As the British journal The Spectator put it, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington April 17, followed by a meeting with Vice-President J.D. Vance the next day in Rome, won’t amuse Paris or London. Meloni did not achieve great concrete results—if one discounts Trump’s promise of a tariff deal with the EU and his visit to Rome in the near future—but her welcome in the White House was quite different from the treatment received by other, preceding European leaders.
At the press conference after meeting with Trump, Meloni did pay lip service to the sophistical EU formula of “an aggressor and a victim” in the Ukraine war, and that Italy wants “a just and lasting peace,” but she emphasized that she wants to work with the U.S. administration to achieve it. On trade, she said Italian firms want to invest $10 billion in the U.S. and Italy wants to increase collaboration on the energy front, including LNG, and also nuclear power. Both she and Trump stressed their common approach to the immigration issue.
It is not much, but it is something in comparison with the failure of the meeting organized by “a certain Frenchman” in Paris, Gavin Mortimer wrote in The Spectator. “For years, Emmanuel Macron has strutted the international stage as Europe’s de facto leader. But no more. He is still trying desperately to remain relevant. Perhaps it was a coincidence that on the same day Meloni met Trump in the White House, Macron organized at short notice a meeting in Paris at which Secretary of State Marco Rubio and America’s special envoy Steve Witkoff were present. Ukraine was top of the agenda but, as Le Monde reported this morning, ‘no real progress’ was made.”
As for Meloni’s call to make not only America, but also “the West great again,” she clearly aimed at resonating with J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich. “When I speak about (the) West mainly, I don’t speak about geographical space. I speak about the civilization, and I want to make that civilization stronger.”
The problem is that Meloni is thinking in geopolitical terms, and according to Trump’s friend George Lombardi, she is thinking of pulling “pro-Western” members of the BRICS, Russia, Brazil and India, away from China. Moreover, her idea of inviting Trump to Rome together with EU officials is quite a bad one.
